ISIS Second Target Station
Occasionally there are significant scientific breakthroughs that general punters hear very little of. This week there was a breakthrough that the newspapers and news broadcasters barely touched, yet it was a major milestone for research across a range of crucial research areas, such as clean energy and the environment, pharmaceuticals and health care through to nanotechnology, materials engineering and IT.
I’m referring to the creation of the first neutrons in the ISIS Second Target Station, something which has taken five years in construction and planning and prepares the facility to make discoveries that affect almost every aspect of our lives.
There are understandable, but not admirable, reasons as to why big developments like this don’t make the news. The science is often perceived to be either too hard or too prosaic for the general reader. The first excuse is patronising, the second is just wrong.
Opinion formers are waking up though, witness the Large Hadron Collider which, it has been announced this week, will be activated on 10 September. CERN’s PR team has done a brilliant job of raising the profile of this unprecedentedly important physics experiment. Whether it’s through pub banter about black holes or serious debate about addressing environmental concerns, physics is crucial and developments like ISIS should be more worthy of newspapers’ column inches.
